I have a new blog!

From now on I'll be posting here:
hannahharrington.blogspot.com

I've made a few posts there already, so check it out! I'm not sure yet what I'm going to be doing with this journal. I might start cross-posting to it in the future, or else create an LJ RSS feed for people to join, but for right now I'm only at Blogspot.

I was thinking the other day after I watched Shutter Island how there are certain actors/actresses out there who I will watch ANYTHING they are in.

( I decided to make a short list. )

So those are my top five. Others I really love: Shia LaBeouf, Gael García Bernal, and Greg Kinnear. Who are yours?

--

Link of the day: 10 Million Free Books Delivered to Tennessee Children Through Dolly Parton's Imagination Library. A really nice story. ♥

Yesterday I watched the 1990 film version of The Handmaid's Tale. ( More... )

I also watched Shutter Island last night, and it was... okay. I do love Leonardo DiCaprio to death, though; I'll watch anything he's in.

--

Link of the day: This Is Why I'll Never Be An Adult.

This speaks to me on so many levels. SO MANY:

The longer I procrastinate on returning phone calls and emails, the more guilty I feel about it. The guilt I feel causes me to avoid the issue further, which only leads to more guilt and more procrastination. It gets to the point where I don't email someone for fear of reminding them that they emailed me and thus giving them a reason to be disappointed in me.

Then the guilt from my ignored responsibilities grows so large that merely carrying it around with me feels like a huge responsibility. It takes up a sizable portion of my capacity, leaving me almost completely useless for anything other than consuming nachos and surfing the internet like an attention-deficient squirrel on PCP.

It's an amusing (if only in the sad-but-true sense) read.

I heard about this from a friend of mine: Smart Girls At the Party. It's a web series starring Amy Poehler which is meant to "celebrate girls who are changing the world by being themselves"; in each episode Amy interviews one girl between the ages of 7 and 13 about their interests and passions, their future goals, their thoughts on feminism, etc.

Here's an example:


Find more videos like this on Smart Girls at the Party


It's a very cute and entertaining series, and I really appreciate the idea behind it. And every episode ends in a dance party!! How awesome is that? It doesn't hurt that I adore Amy Poehler. (I also think she plays the most feminist character on television at the moment-- Leslie Knope from Parks & Rec). It's a really cool project and you should check it out if you have the time!

Funniest thing I've read in awhile: I'm Comic Sans, Asshole.

"Listen up. I know the shit you've been saying behind my back. You think I'm stupid. You think I'm immature. You think I'm a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I'm Comic Sans, and I'm the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg."

Yesterday I finished reading What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell. It's a fantastic book, easily the best I've read recently. Without spoiling it for you, it's a YA novel set in post-WWII, part coming-of-age, part romance, and part mystery. I'd heard high praise for it, but it surpassed my expectations. The characters were compelling, it was full of lush, vivid imagery, and I was trying to put the pieces together right along with the protagonist, Evie. There were maybe a few chapters in the middle that felt a little slow, but I'm not sure if they were actually slow or if I was just impatient to find out what was going to happen. Regardless, it's definitely worth a read!

On the writing front: Cover options are still being batted around for SAVING JUNE. But I've seen a number of them and I'm excited to see what the finalized version will be. As soon as it's decided and I have the all clear, I promise to share it with you guys!

I've also gone ahead and added Saving June to GoodReads, so if that's a site you use (which you should-- it's awesome) and are so inclined, you can add it to your to-read list!

After much careful deliberation (ie: listening to the albums back-to-back twice), I've decided my favorite Spoon album is Girls Can Tell. Gimme Fiction comes in second (unpopular opinion?). Though Kill the Moonlight is also great ("The Way We Get By" is amazing).

So today my editor sent me seven sample covers for Saving June, complete with the title and my name on each one. I liked almost all of them, really liked two of them, and absolutely loved one of them. And it looks like the one I love the most will be the cover, with another I really liked as a "backup."

I emailed back and forth with my editor for a bit about the covers, and then called my agent to see if she'd seen them yet and what she thought. She agreed with my choice being the best. We went on to talk for awhile about other things-- ARCs, line edits, my other projects, and other, random fun topics not having much to do with anything, which is the cool thing about having an agent you get along with so well. :)

Obviously the cover isn't finalized yet, so I can't show it to you guys, but I can't wait. It's going to be awesome!

I just got back from a vacation to the Bahamas-- it was awesome. I stayed at Atlantis, a huge resort, and kind of pricey (even if I stayed in the cheapest part of it), but worth the money. I highly recommend staying there. Pools galore, fun water rides, beautiful beaches, lagoons with sea turtles and sting rays and aquariums with sharks, and I even did a dolphin interaction which was a blast.

So awhile ago I had a conversation with a writer friend about branding in publishing. Most writers are already aware of all this, and I'm certainly no expert on the matter, but I thought I'd share my (disorganized and non-eloquent) thoughts on the subject anyway.

( Author Branding and Why It's Important )

So last night and this morning I spent a few hours reading all of the recaps on Somewhere Between YA Lit and Death, a hilarious (and sadly apparently now defunct) blog devoted to snarking on old Lurlene McDaniel books. I can't tell you how many times I laughed out loud reading the recaps, even of books I never read myself.

Remember Lurlene McDaniel? I used to eat her books UP as a kid. Like, I didn't own any, I don't think, but growing up the public library was within walking distance, and in summers especially I would CAMP OUT in the Teen section. I really do mean camp out-- like sit on the floor and live there for hours with piles of books. And as a kid who thrived on angst and romance, man, Lurlene McDaniel DELIVERED. You always knew two things when you opened one of her books: 1) someone was going to die and 2) someone was going to fall in love. Win/win, am I right?? The only way I would've loved them more is if they were all about horses.

Since they were not, I got my horse fix from a variety of different sources-- most namely, The Saddle Club and the Thoroughbred series. I owned an obscene amount of Saddle Club books which I read and reread until they literally fell apart. I didn't obsess over the Thoroughbred books quite as much, but I did read them with regularity. So imagine my delight when I discovered Whitebrook Farm, a blog dedicated to snarkily recapping not only Thoroughbred books but some Saddle Club ones and other horse-related series and classics.

There are other similar recap sites: The Dairi Burger, which covers Sweet Valley High books, and Claudia's Room, snarking on The Babysitter's Club series.

I wonder if there's one out there for R.L. Stine's Fear Street series. I was way too cool for Goosebumps, okay, so I only read Fear Street books because they were waaaaaaaaaaaay more mature and adult. By the way, did you know R.L. Stine has an actual Twitter?? It kind of blows my mind.

Today I watched a documentary about the humanitarian crisis in the Congo, and also found out that our family friend's cat died last night... only one of these things made me cry, and I'm a little embarrassed to say it was the latter. I guess this makes me a prime example in the compassion fatigue the documentary went into detail about.

In my defense, we lived with the family friend for almost a year, and then took care of the cat for a few months in our own apartment, so even though she was the haughtiest cat I've ever encountered, I was a little attached. And I only cried when my mom told me the cat went into the kitchen and had a seizure, and when our family friend picked her up, she started purring and then just... died. I'm not really upset, the cat was old, it's just kind of sad.

Of course, now the only things on tv are Marley & Me, Apollo 13, and The Diary of Anne Frank. The world insists on being depressing today.

YouTube removes original "Rickroll" video due to terms of use violation.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

...false alarm. It's back! Thank @god. That thing needs to be preserved... it's like a historical artifact of the internet. (I know, I know, it's not THAT old, even in internet years, but still. It's significant!) (I'm really stretching here, aren't I?)

Speaking of YouTube videos, I saw this posted on another blog I read:



The person behind it says it's in response to this essay which presents an explanation/defense of the backlash Taylor Swift has received post-VMAs.

Despite the use of the word "pussy" at the end (really? gendered insults when you're making a case for feminism? come on now), I think the video does make some valid points. Let me preface this by saying I've never heard Taylor Swift's album in full, just the radio singles, and I do think she seems like a sweet girl. (Also, her stint on Saturday Night Live made me laugh a lot, and anyone who knows the current state of SNL knows that's quite the feat.) And as a songwriter, she's at least talented in the sense that she can write a mean hook-- I had You Belong With Me and Love Story both stuck in my head for the longest time (though the random Nathaniel Hawthorne literary reference in the latter makes me think she never actually read The Scarlett Letter).

I don't think Taylor Swift is really a cause of why our culture is the way it is so much as a symptom. Same with the Twilight series. I guess I find it more troubling that young girls of this generation are apparently clamoring so much for media that espouses these kind of values... I mean, there are certainly alternatives, in both literature and music, but none seem to match the surging popularity of these two.

Anyway, that's my thought of the day. Now I'm going to go read for a little while.